


bloodflood

by songandsilence



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M, Ficathon, Ghost Drifting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-24
Updated: 2013-07-24
Packaged: 2017-12-21 05:38:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/896449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/songandsilence/pseuds/songandsilence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the Mako/Raleigh ficathon going on over on LJ.<br/>Prompt: the events of the film cause a media storm that puts mako and raleigh under a microscope, pausing the progression of their relationship. then they begin to dream about each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bloodflood

“Now, we know Jaeger pilots have a special bond,” the reporter is saying. With the lights bright in their eyes, it is all that Mako and Raleigh can do not to shield their faces and hunch in their seats. But since this is the fifteenth talk show they have been on after countless in the Shatterdome or on rooftops with the devastation of Hong Kong or Los Angeles or Singapore in the background, they don’t. Their eyes have adjusted to the glare of the lights, they have gotten better at warding off the questions they have grown weary of hearing: _what it was like in the Breach_ and _do you think Marshall Pentecost made the right call_ and _what’s next?_.

“Yes,” answers Mako automatically, when the reporter pauses and waits. She is still as stone beside him, back straight and unyielding, but he can feel the exhaustion rolling off of her in waves. Barely able to keep himself upright in the chair, he can’t fathom how she is staying so attentive. Then again, he’s pretty sure she has always been stronger than him. “The Drift binds you together.”

He glances at her. The lights angle sharply behind her, bathing her in bright light that washes out her skin and the blue in her hair. She has lost weight, leaving shadowed hollows under her cheekbones. Feeling him looking, her eyes slide sideways and touch his skin briefly, like a breath on the back of his neck.

The reporter leans forward eagerly, “What’s it like, the Drift?”

“Like nothing else,” Raleigh tells her flatly. The words have lost their meaning.

“I would imagine it’s rather thrilling, knowing you have a soulmate for the rest of your life.”

Both of them freeze. It’s not as though people haven’t called them that before, but the word didn’t used to sting like this. Raleigh wants to look at her, to see how she is reacting, but he forces himself not to. He can feel it well enough – the sudden stiffness in her spine, the quick inhale through her nose. Pulling the aching parts of his body together, he sits up straighter. “We are very close,” he replies, sensing baited breath in everyone from the reporter to the camera crew.

And he’s right – the reporter’s smile widens. “How close?”

After, once they have given frustratingly vague answers to a disappointed member of the press, they are escorted out of the building. Mako’s heels click along beside him, and he swallows. The sight of her in a cleanly tailored dress makes something deep inside him twist. He misses the military cargos.

As soon as the door to the outside opens, they are bombarded with a roar of sound that sends Raleigh’s heart stumbling for a moment. The world goes white for a moment and he sees 2,500 tons of rippling hide and glowing blue. But it is only a crowd of people clamoring for their attention, camera flashes going off from every direction.

Before, Raleigh would have intertwined their hands and they would have walked together through the crowd and back to the quiet solace of their hotel room. But they had learned their lesson. People _scream_ when they hold hands. Photos of them holding each other at Marshall Pentecost’s funeral or huddling close together underneath an umbrella circulate on the news for months. The speculation and dissection of their relationship consumes every corner of the internet, every breath of the media. Their skin becomes sensitive, flinching away from each touch they crave so much.

It is impossible for people to know that their closeness is different than what they can understand. That with one touch of her fingers to the small of his back she can communicate that she knows every shadowy corner of his mind and that she is _still there_.

They are lead through the crowd, two paces between them. Back at the hotel, the elevator ride up to their floor is silent, the air between them brittle. The doors open. Mako turn left, Raleigh turns right.

 

* * *

 

The room is dark when Mako wakes, just a sliver of light working its way through a crack in her curtains and casting the space a soft grey. There is a light touch at her stomach, the scratch of stubble on her hipbone. She trembles. “Raleigh?”

He looks up, chin dragging gently across her skin, and smiles. Even in the half-dark, she can see the corners of his eyes crinkle as he looks at her, face open and warm. It is like a punch to the gut. She has missed that look.

Without saying anything, he settles his body between her legs and presses an open-mouthed kiss to her stomach, her hip, the top of her thigh. Shivers ripple across her skin, and without meaning to she reaches out and skims her fingers across his temple, buries them in his hair. The groan that leaves him echoes through her.

His breath is warm on her skin. She doesn’t remember taking off her clothes, but they are gone. Slowly, he trails kisses up her thighs, his mouth soft and agonizing. Mako shifts on the cool sheets, lifting her hips to him. This makes him grin, but doesn’t make him move any faster. Every touch is careful, adoring, _too slow_.

She squirms under him and he laughs. The puff of breath against her core is almost enough to make a moan slip from her lips. Just as she raises her head to tell him off for taking too long, she is struck speechless when he finally puts his mouth on her.

Her back arches sharply off the bed as the breath leaves her lungs, but he has her anchored at the hips, his hands wide and warm across her aching muscles. Stubble scratches her skin, but _fuck_ it feels good and she can’t do anything but writhe and gasp and grip his hair with iron fingers. Hitched, whispered oaths are leaving her lips in every language she knows as he delves his tongue into her like he doesn’t remember that air exists.

His teeth graze her warm, slick skin and her eyes shut so tightly she sees stars. She has always loved his hands, big and scarred and capable – she just didn’t know how capable. With another graze of his teeth and a twist of the fingers inside of her, her back arches off of the bed again and the world goes momentarily white.

Mako wakes in her bed with a start, twisted in sweaty sheets. Alone.

 

* * *

 

They sit silently across from each other at breakfast, and she is trying to watch him without letting him know she is watching him. A near impossible feat.

Breakfast became a tradition some time ago, back when they were changing time zones so often that the only way to drag themselves out of their bed was to do it together. Usually Mako always wakes quickly, though it takes her hours to shut down before sleep. Raleigh is a big, annoying cat that can stretch out and sleep just about anywhere, but he has to claw his way out of dreamland in the morning.

 _Dreamland._ Spearing fruit – real, honest to god fresh fruit – with her fork, she glances up at him through her overgrown bangs. When they had slept tangled together, she had known every dream and every nightmare of his. They had brushed her consciousness like his breath on her shoulder. Once she had even dreamed of Yancy, and woke with a yell. He held her through the disorientation, said he had dreamt it too.

That was the strangest thing about the Drift, perhaps. Not the hyper-awareness of each other, or even the intense need for physical proximity that now made her clench her hands until she left half-moon shapes makes in her palm. No, it was the confusion of his memories for hers.

She remembers the Alaskan coast with such intensity that she can _smell_ the cold salt air, taste the pine trees on her tongue, feel the early morning mist on her cheeks as she runs down the dock with her brother. It takes her long minutes to remember that she never had a brother.

Once he had recapped an entire movie for her, a movie about fish in the sea (complete with impressions, she might add, which he is surprisingly good at. Or maybe he’s just good at making her laugh.), before his voice had trailed off and he realized he had never seen it. She had, she told him. She had watched it countless times with Marshall Pentecost as a child.

Across the table from him now, she lets her eyes skim over his tanned face. The stubble on his cheeks makes her draw a slow, deep breath to steady the fluttering in her stomach. Then he looks up, and she sees his cheeks are red.

 

* * *

 

They are back in his room in the Shatterdome, all corroding iron and not-quite-white walls. Trancelike, he looks up at her as she straddles his hips and lifts the black tank top from her body. He exhales slowly, allowing himself to take in every inch of pale, muscled skin. His hands flutter at her hips, and for a beat he is nearly bowled over by the fact that he might be lucky enough to have her, that she is choosing _him_.

 _Only you,_ she thinks, and he feels it like the beat of his heart against his ribs.

Without hesitation, he echoes, _Only you_.

There is a smug smile on her face, because she can clearly tell just the effect she has on him, and she leans down and hovers just an inch above his lips. Instinctively, he tilts his chin up, but she shifts back just enough to stay out of his reach. Her breath is warm on his cheeks, the air between them thick and unhurried.

When she does kiss him, it is slow and soft. Her eyelashes on his cheek make something turn over deep in his chest, and for long moments he can do nothing but hold her, one hand cupping the base of her skull.

Then her teeth graze his lip, and his hips automatically roll up into hers, hard. A strangely joyful moan leaves her, and then her fingers are tugging at his hair and that is something he did not know he liked but _holy shit_ he likes it when she does it.

Suddenly, the world shifts and he is on top of her, buried inside of her. Her legs are tight around him, pressing up against his ribs, one heel digging into the small of his back. One of his hands is in her hair, gripping her neck, his thumb pressed against her cheek. Her mouth on his is demanding, pulling away only to let out breathy gasps that make him want to fucking _explode_.

Face pressed into her cheek, he can do nothing to stop the tidal wave of possessiveness that wells up within him. It is blinding, consuming, but what is most spectacular is that he feels it echoed back at him. Lifting his head, her dark eyes look at him through long eyelashes and tell him, _mine_. Their eyes remain locked until he can’t hold himself together anymore and has to bury his face in her shoulder, biting down to muffle a yell in the skin just above her collarbone.

Raleigh wakes with sweat on his forehead, already cooling in the chilled, empty room. _Again?_ he thinks, and wishes that he wasn’t so shamefully grateful.

 

* * *

 

Breakfast the next morning is painful. Literally. Raleigh shifts in his seat and tries to look at her without seeing her hair caught on the sweat on her brow, feeling her fingernails on his chest. _Fuck_ , he is terrible at this.

Every single moment they have been together but apart has been dull and horrible, the ache of it overwhelming. Now it’s worse. As he looks at her, he sees a light flush high on her cheeks, and she spears her strawberry with far too much violence. Oh yeah, she definitely had those dreams too. He’s 99% sure of it. But sitting there in silence and pretending is enormously frustrating. Biting the inside of his cheek, Raleigh stirs his black coffee aimlessly and wonders how to broach the topic.

_Did you have extremely intense and realistic sex dreams about me last night and the night before? You know, when I ate you out and --_

Yeah, he is not starting this conversation that way. Just thinking about it starts to make him hard. Gritting his teeth and getting control of himself again, he feels her muffled curiosity. Leave it to Mako to pick up on his secrets as easily as breathing.

Wearily, he closes his eyes for a moment. He just misses her.

“We should talk about it,” she says suddenly. Raleigh jerks his head up, sees her cheeks bright but her back straight, determined. She never ceases to surprise him. “I know you dreamed it too, and it does us no good to pretend otherwise.”

A wry smile tugs at his mouth. “You dreamed it too?”

She rolls her eyes. “Of course I did.” He chokes back a laugh. God, he had missed her. “It was…far too vivid to just be a dream.” Dark eyes flickering up to meet his, she seems uncertain for the first time. “Was it some sort of Drift? Or a side effect of the Drift?”

It feels so unbelievably good to be speaking with her again that he honestly doesn’t even care what they’re talking about. “I don’t know. Could be.” They stare at each other. There’s a fork in her hands still, resting at a strange angle on the edge of the bowl. Raleigh opens his mouth to say something, doesn’t know what to say. “I missed you,” is what comes out.

In a heartbeat, her face relaxes into a smile that sends his heart thundering in his chest. “I missed you, too,” she murmurs. They sit there with dumb grins on their faces for god knows how long, and then she asks the question he doesn’t want to ask. “What about the press? What if this happens again?”

“Fuck them,” is his immediate response. Why had it never seemed this simple before? When she shoots him a flat look, he says, “No, seriously, fuck everyone else. You’re all I care about.”

There’s a beat of silence followed by a wave of emotion from Mako that floods his entire body with warmth. The connection between them sings. Her smile takes on a very smug, happy quality and as she stands, she holds out her hand to him. “Come here.”

He takes it, then asks, “Where are we going?” Her touch has already told him, but he wants to hear her say it.

She shoots him a challenging look. “Don’t you want to see how compatible we are in real life?”

Raleigh knows. He knows, and he follows her.

 

* * *

 

They wake up slowly, tangled in the sheets and each other. Raleigh presses a kiss to her forehead and she hums happily into his neck. It is just barely light out, and he can’t get over the luxury of having so much time with her. That this is just the beginning.

Suddenly, she rolls on top of him, straddling his hips, grinning down at him. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” he answers, voice low and rough. The smile on his face must be just plain stupid, but he is beyond caring. He surges up towards her and she lets out a loud, joyful laugh just before their lips crash together.

They decide to stay in bed for a while.


End file.
